Yueren Chen-Sally

Dr. Sarah Arva Grosik

EDUC 8215/003 TESOL Practice Teaching

CBLP Reflection Blog #2

Sep 21, 2023

CBLP Reflection Blog #2

Despite only the first two encounters with our community members at the Northeastern

Academy of Philadelphia, my co-teacher Peilin and I have already gained some insights into the

various needs of them in general and in classroom language learning specifically, based on our

in-class observation and information we have gathered from our brief interview with Dr. Xie, the

site supervisor.

By and large, adult students in the Northeastern Academy of Philadelphia are mostly

Chinese immigrants who are in urgent need of integrating into a new societal/cultural

environment and seeking inclusion in American life. With salient foreign-bound identities,

moving to the US and restarting their life in a whole new country are never easy jobs for them.

Moreover, as adults, a large number of them have already set up their own families and started

their careers (either full-time or part-time). They are taking more responsibilities regarding their

working colleagues, partners, children, or even grandchildren. No longer as footloose as kids are

and being bound by their everyday time schedule, our adult students require effective and

efficient lessons as well as learning materials that clear away redundancy and boost actual

productiveness. One other thing we have also noticed is that some of our senior students are not

as tech-savvy as younger learners. They find it hard to enter breakout rooms, access chat-box

documents via Zoom, and put down their thoughts and comments in Google exit tickets. Those
students need extra technological scaffolding during our virtual meetings and we are planning to

adjust classroom dynamics and activities to make online learning less intimidating for them.

To understand our students better, Peilin and I conducted an informal needs-analysis

survey right after our first lesson last week, in which we received intriguing and fruitful

feedback. In the first place, our students, as beginning to pre-intermediate ELLs (English

language learners), are concerned with upgrading all four language modalities, including

listening, speaking, reading, and writing. They have very diversified English learning needs.

While some students reported that they have an issue with memorizing derivations of newly

taught vocabulary and identifying them in texts and would like to improve their reading abilities,

some others explicitly addressed their necessity to enhance their grammatical acuteness and

fluency in English in order to communicate smoothly with their acquaintances. And as expected,

all of our students hope to improve their daily English skills in multiple real-life contexts,

ranging from grocery shopping to medical counseling, and to job searching. And we will make

sure to tailor our lesson plans according to that.

Overall, students’ needs in general and in the domain of English language learning

intersect with each other and we student-teachers are facing more than one challenge. We are

happy to continue evaluating their needs throughout our teaching trajectory this semester and get

our hands on meeting them to be best of our ability.